I sent off a note to Malcolm Gladwell through his website with the nitpicks I mentioned in my review of Blink, in particular the height study and the Ted Williams story. Much to my surprise, Gladwell wrote me back thanking me for the observations and loving the Ted Williams story. Cool! While thinking about it […]
Firefly
[ed. note: As a complete break from the cognitive science type philosophy that has filled this space recently, we bring you a rant about television] I finally got the DVD set of Firefly last week, and have now watched the whole series. For those of you who don’t know, Firefly was a show created by […]
Cognitive subroutines and context
More thoughts on yesterday’s cognitive subroutines post after thinking about it some more, partially in response to Jofish’s comment. Jofish brings up the importance of leveraging the real world. We don’t have to store a hypothetical model for everything in the real world, because we can use the real world to store information about itself, […]
Cognitive subroutines
This is going to be a relatively long post, mostly inspired by reading Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell, and Sources of Power, by Gary Klein, both books that explain how and why our unconscious decision-making capabilities are often better than our conscious ones, and also explain when such capabilities fail and need to be over-ridden. I […]
Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell
Amazon link I’ve been talking about Gladwell for almost a month now, so it was high time I actually read Blink. The “thin-sliced” summary? It’s interesting, but shallow. By now, if you’ve read any of the interviews, or heard him speak on the radio, you probably know the premise of the book – that we […]
Balancing control and autonomy
I previously linked to this New Yorker article on how the army is self organizing to handle the challenges of Iraq. After putting up the link, I had a conversation with a coworker that evoked some more thoughts. One was the observation that the army is composed of units, each of which can be run […]
The Making of a Philosopher, by Colin McGinn
Amazon link I picked this up in a used bookstore because it purported to be McGinn’s “Journey through Twentieth-Century Philosophy”. I have a layman’s interest in philosophy (my humanities concentration at MIT was in the field), and was curious as to what some of the developments in the twentieth century were. Plus, it was cheap. […]
Jamie Zawinski on groupware
Jamie Zawinski posted a rant about groupware yesterday, pointed to by both Clay Shirky at Many-to-Many and Joel on Software. Zawinski is famous for being one of the first employees of Netscape, and then resigning notoriously. His rant about groupware is worth reading, but I’ll excerpt the lines that particularly caught my attention here. So […]
The Passion of the Geek
I was IM-ing a friend of mine a few days ago, and was telling her that I wasn’t sure I wanted to remain a programmer, commenting that I wasn’t really a geek at heart. She replied “you’ll always be a geek though. you can be a pundit geek”, which got us into a brief discussion […]
Presence in IM
danah boyd just put up a post about different styles of using IM (instant messaging), contrasting those who use it in an always-on way versus those who turn it on only to talk. It’s an interesting reflection on the social cues that people lose when moving to an online world, and how it takes time […]
